When the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court – which meets behind closed doors and makes its actions known to virtually no one – decided to redefine the word “relevant,” its move allowed the National Security Agency to broaden its spying operations. Not that the citizens knew this.

Perhaps the FISA finds the citizens irrelevant.

Which is exactly the problem.

There was a day when information about your telephone calls – what numbers you dialed, how long you talked – was off limits to authorities. And then, a day later, that information was available to the NSA. Because a super-secret court said it was.

This is not how things are supposed to work in the most open society ever created. As more and more details about the government’s ability to spy on the citizens have become known in recent weeks, officials have taken two tacks in defending their advanced techniques:

First, they’ve pushed hard in saying that their efforts have stopped terrorists attacks before they could happen. And second, they’ve argued that the enhanced efforts have been approved by Congress and the courts and the executive branch.

Both of these arguments are specious in the extreme.

The first is an attempt to change the discussion, to divert people’s attention, to scare the citizens into silence. And the second is true in name alone.

The FISA Court is as removed from the citizenry as were the operations of the old East German Stasi. And congressional actions and amendments have not exactly been debated on TV.

If the citizens are not part of the discussion, if the government acts in the dark and we know almost nothing of their doings, then we’ve become a nation that’s far removed from the land of liberty, a government of and by and for the people.